Modernity and Politics in the Work of Max Weber

Charles Turner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415064903
• eBook ISBN: 9781134921515
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This rich and assured book is a major contribution to the growing Weber industry. It reveals Weber's theory of modernity in a new and unexpected light.

Chapter 1

The Coherence of the Concept of Modernity

The modern age…in contrast to the middle ages, is not present in advance of its self-interpretation, and while its self-interpretation is not what propelled the advance of the modern age, it is something that the age has continually needed in order to give itself form… This makes the concept of an epoch itself a significant element of the epoch.

(Hans Blumenberg)

the discontent of modernity with itself exists only on the basis of historical consciousness, of the knowledge of other and ‘better’ times.

(Karl Löwith)

The other way around: historical consciousness is a result of the discontent of modernity with itself.

(Leo Strauss)

Introduction

Is there anything left to say on the subject of modernity which hasn’t already been said or implied in the mountain of literature which has appeared in the last ten years? Aren’t the main theoretical and political positions by now so entrenched that everyone knows roughly what the stakes are? Can’t the remaining work in this area be divided into that which pushes the birth of the modern world as far back as possible, and that which pulls it in the other direction, or into that which views modernity from a pre-modern, a postmodern, or an ‘intra-modern’ perspective? And can’t those who push the line back, and who adopt a pre-modern or post-modern perspective be called conservatives, and those who pull it forward but remain committed to the recent project that line defines be called radicals? Haven’t the debates between Habermas and Gadamer, Habermas and Lyotard, Maclntyre and his critics, Derrida and Foucault, Rawls and his critics exhausted the main lines of argument over what constitutes the modern age, what it entitles us to know and to hope for?

The answer is probably yes, but in all of these debates, the name of Max Weber has hovered in the background, asking those who believe they have solved the problems they set themselves to think again, and reminding them that what they think are their own problems were his too. In the last ten years, his significance has begun to increase, not only as a figure without reference to whom talk about the nature of the modern world makes no sense, but as someone whose work the participants in those debates increasingly wish to claim as their own.

To take one example. In the early sixties the debate between critical theory and neo-Aristotelianism in Germany took the form of an argument for or against the Enlightenment, for the idea of an ethics binding on all human beings or for the ‘rehabilitation of practical philosophy’, grounded in a concrete ethos.¹ For both sides Weber was an enemy. For Habermas and Marcuse he was a decisionist whose work contained no hint of the possibility of binding norms,² for political scientists like Voegelin and Wilhelm Hennis his conception of the state as a power organisation with no inherent purpose meant that the political science which accompanied it was inadequate to treat questions of the good life for human beings and of the concrete practices in which that life might be embedded.³ Since then, with the exhaustion of the Habermas-Gadamer debate, the positions have remained largely the same, but Weber has been rediscovered, in Habermas’s case as the analyst of the institutional consequences of the ‘splitting apart’ of reason,⁴ in Karl-Otto Apel’s case as one whose ethic of responsibility is the standard against which his and Habermas’s discourse ethics must measure itself⁵ and in Hennis’s as someone whose science after all fulfils an Aristotelian function—the education of the judgement of members of a political community.⁶

I am not sure that these authors have done Weber the favour they think they have. It is one thing to rediscover an author, another to treat him/her as a recruit in one’s own campaign. Hennis’s interpretation in particular, though the most spectacular to appear in recent years, would have us believe that it is an act of devotion which at the same time wrests Weber from the clutches of those—particularly American sociologists—who don’t deserve and haven’t understood him. But the plea to pay Weber ‘complete attention’ rings hollow.⁷ To let Weber speak to us directly is to become acquainted, indirectly, with Hennis’s own neo-Aristotelian project. At least Habermas makes his instrumental reading of others, including Weber, fairly obvious.

On the other hand, a criticism of these readings merely for being instrumental hardly grasps their specificity. Instead, I want to try to show why these newer interpretations are wrong by asking two questions, only the first of which critical theory and neo-Aristotelianism take seriously. Firstly, what was Weber’s account of modernity? Secondly, what theoretical status did he believe this account was entitled to claim for itself in the very light of its findings? For the distinctiveness of modernity consists not only in the empirically observable emergence of the modern state, a modern understanding of self, modern capitalism, modern science, but in our very need to define the modern epoch.

Human Finitude and the Caesural Need

Odo Marquard has suggested that modernity be understood in terms of the transformation of a limit, the substitution of one version of human finitude for another.⁸ Here, secularisation consists in a decline in the significance of a power boundary between human beings and God, and a concomitant increase in that of the spatial and temporal boundaries between human beings. And as globalisation undermines the significance of the spatial boundary, that of the temporal increases further. Hence an epochal consciousness, an increased sensitivity to historical transformations and to what distinguishes one epoch from another, becomes central to the modern epoch. In terms of an anthropology of finitude, the importance of modernity lies not so much in a transition to a new age, worldliness as opposed to unworldliness, the substitution of immanence for transcendence, but more in the fact that the very formulation of that epoch’s substantive characteristics is the satisfaction of a secularised, temporalised, caesural need. The most obvious temporal caesura is the medieval-modern break, either in its pro-modern, enlightenment version, or in the form of a romantic or classicist anti-modernism. But as Marquard notes, there is also the ‘futurised antimodernism’ of the modern-post-modern distinction, which embraces the Utopian elements of Marxism, Nietzsche’s philosophy of the future and those contemporary theories which claim that we already live in a ‘postmodern age’.

For Marquard the caesural demand is such that it cannot be met in two places at once, or rather, at more than one temporal threshold. So for a classicist like Leo Strauss, the dramatic character of the pre-modern/modern distinction, the myth of the modern’s origin, has to be secured by the reduction of the middle ages to antiquity, while what Marquard calls futurised anti-modernism, by emphasising the modern/post-modern threshold, necessarily deprives the pre-modern/modern threshold of its threshold character, ‘de-dramatises’ it, leaving historical research into that threshold free to discover new (pre-modern) indices of modernity or to alter significant dates: ‘how much has changed where almost nothing has changed, and how little has changed where almost everything has changed’.⁹

Max Weber never presented the medieval/modern distinction in especially dramatic, caesural terms; for him there was no ‘breakthrough’ to the modern world. If Marquard is right, then part of the explanation is perhaps that for him the power boundary between human beings and god had never completely lost its significance, but more importantly that he insisted on the continuing relevance of spatial boundaries, expressed most forcefully in his emphasis on the distinctions between ‘value spheres’ and in the centrality of territoriality to his definition of the modern state. Weber’s account of modernity has far more to do with the question of what, ‘today’, is possible and what is not, with the conditions of contemporary historical action.

It is perhaps no accident that the sharpest critics of Weber’s ethics and politics are those for whom the pre-modern/modern break has precisely the dramatic character which Weber’s version of it lacks. For romantic and classicist anti-modernists he cannot see the significance of the pre-modern/modern caesura and is in thrall to the modern, for critical theory and especially Habermas he cannot see the pre-modern/modern caesura and therefore fails to recognise the connection between modern rationality and human emancipation. What these critics object to is less Weber’s philosophy of the human sciences, his mistaken account of the relationship between meaning and cause or the theory of charismatic leadership, than the fact that these individual features of his work are all indices of a degenerate modernity. Weber himself could never have had an adequate theory of modernity because the only possible version of such a theory implies either a critique of the modern age as a whole, or an acknowledgement of the modern ‘project’. Conversely, if Weber believed neither in the rehabilitation of Greek political thinking, nor in a link between enlightenment rationality and freedom, it was hardly incumbent upon him to develop a thoroughgoing theory of the the modern ‘epoch’. What would have been at stake for him had he done so?

Given the assumed centrality of ‘the modern’ in Weber research, especially in the last ten years, it is surprising how little attention has been given to the question of whether and how one ought to construct epochal thresholds. To be sure, the variety of senses in which the terms modernity, the modern and modernism are used does not inspire confidence in the belief that the concept of modernity has any coherence. In particular, there seems to be a series of incommensurabilities:

1 between participants’ accounts of the criteria (political, aesthetic, economic, cognitive, etc.) according to which the concept of ‘modernity’ is to be defined;

2 between participants’ understandings of the type of concept ‘modernity’ is (i.e. between individual, generic and ideal typical concepts);

3 between those features of an individual participant’s account in which (i) an object is being described; (ii) a characteristic of an object or set of objects is being employed in its description; (iii) a term is being used, nominalistically, to collect a series of objects or characteristics of objects; (iv) a critical or endorsing stance towards a set of objects is being recommended.

In Weber research modernity tends to be theorised in two senses: as the contemporary Western epoch; and as newness or innovation per se, regardless of the historical time or culture in which it occurs. The first sense resolves itself into an alternative between the idea of modernity as a subject lying behind appearances, a backstage area housing the director of front-stage social and political activity, and the predicative exercise of discovering ever new spheres of cultural life to which the label ‘modern’ can be attached. The second is expressed most explicitly in Mommsen’s charisma-rationalisation schema, according to which world-historical innovation is the product of periodic charismatic ‘eruptions’.¹⁰

Yet most epochal, caesural accounts of modernity depend upon the extrapolation from one set of predicates to the set of all possible predicates, upon the globalisation of a local phenomenon, in which the onesidedness of a specific problematic becomes the universality of a general problem. The substantive criteria which define an object domain define the point at which the modern age as a whole breaks with the pre-modern. The tendency today to talk of ‘modernity’ rather than of ‘capitalism’, ‘industrialism’, ‘ascetic protestantism’, ‘bureaucracy’, ‘Gesellschaf’ or ‘organic solidarity’, tends to obscure this, especially when the greater abstractness of the concept ‘modernity’ is taken for greater depth of insight. Not that modernity is a mere word. If an insistence on the onesidedness of all historical inquiry is a legitimate part of a ‘war on totality’,¹¹ the spoils do not have to include abandonment of the term altogether. But in Weber’s case we should be especially wary of the concept of an epoch, firstly because his explicit references to ‘modernity’ and ‘modern culture’ are disparate and inconsistent. The ‘modern world’ is bureaucratic, capitalist, intellectualist, Christian, post-Christian, ‘worldly’ or ‘a tremendous tangle of cultural values’.¹² Weber never attempted seriously to unravel this tangle, for which reason his ‘theory of modernity’ will remain largely a commentator’s reconstruction—or construction.¹³ But secondly, there remains not only the reflexive problem highlighted by Marquard, but the fact that Weber took one of the main consequences of the ‘modernity’ of his own science to be the impossibility of a science of modernity.

Weber himself was acutely aware of the cultural significance of his own scholarly work, and believed that there was an ineradicable split between the intepretive and legislative roles of a ‘cultural science’. In the literature this is usually expressed as science’s value neutrality, but I think it is more important to emphasise that the presupposition of all of the more muscular, theoretically up-front theories of modernity on offer today is that theory has a legislative role, too. Many of those theories feed on talk of ‘crisis’, in particular of a crisis of legitimacy, a discourse in which the voice of the legislator can always be heard.

Modernity from a Pre-Modern Perspective

Modernity as a Crisis in Theology

Perhaps the most popular totalising theory of modernity rests upon a distinction between religion and science, understood not as sets of social practices but as rival, societal ordering principles. Their significance lies in their legitimation function, in their capacity to ‘hold society together’. Whether religion or science are themselves legitimate is less important than the question of their capacity to legitimate the activities which constitute a social or political order. The ‘crisis of modernity’ to which so many allude represents, or can be held to represent, the inefficient operation of an ordering principle.¹⁴ For example, science cannot do the work of God, a causal mechanism founded on law-like connections between appearances provides a less stable account of the continuity between those appearances than does an account of the source from which they derive their meaning.¹⁵

The theoretical rationale for interpreting modernity as crisis is almost always premodern, a point made most forcefully by Hans Blumenberg.¹⁶ Blumenberg argues that modern intellectual curiosity in particular and the ‘modern age’ as a whole display a definite discontinuity with the Christian tradition, and that therefore the content of their intellectual and political endeavours cannot be treated as merely the secularised form of an essentially Christian substance, in particular that ‘progress’ is not secularised eschatology. Yet they did inherit a set of absolutist questions posed by that tra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The coherence of the concept of modernity
• 2. The theory of culture
• 3. The illusion of the epoch
• 4. The Zwischenbetrachtung I: theory of modernity or theory of culture?
• 5. The Zwischenbetrachtung II: a dual theory of tragedy
• 6. Dogmatism, vanity and vocation: the political personality
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index